I recently saw some Kontera ads on a site, where the ads popping up were far from relevant. Just check the screenshot I took of the ad which came up on the word Brightcove: Free credit report.

This really pissed me off. I’m trying to read an article which I thought was interesting, and they slap me in the face with some not-related ads.

From the Kontera website:

Using its patented semantic engine to analyze and understand the true meaning of a page, Kontera delivers relevant ads and information to your users while driving significant, complimentary revenue to your bottom line.

The article the ad was served on had nothing to do with credit ratings, credit cards, identity theft or credit scores. Let alone you would be interested to know your credit score using free credit report, while reading about Google maybe buying Brightcove.

Nowhere in the article I could find something that would make the the free credit report relevant for what I was reading at the time. While at the same time, Kontera does claim to serve “relevant ads and information to your users“ through “analyze and understand the true meaning of a page”.

So who is here to blame? Is it Kontera, who is not capable of serving the right ad, at the right time, targeting the right keywords, persuading the right customer to click and transact? Is it Free credit Report, targeting users reading something that is not relevant to their product, but just want to get the brand value proposition out there? Or is it The Business Insider – Silicon Valley Insider, who is putting this lame sort of advertising on their site, and collecting pennies for every click, while annoying their readers?

In my opinion, the site/webmaster that puts Kontera on their site is at fault here. How can you annoy your readers with these pop-ups that show some badly targeted ads? Even when Kontera writes the following on their website, just do some user testing yourself to track the impact on your user experience:

Since Kontera’s In-Text Advertising units are only activated when users engage with them, Kontera is a non-intrusive way to enhance the user’s browsing experience on your website or blog and deliver additional revenue along with control over the look and feel of your site.

I can hardly blame Kontera, as this is their business model and they are making money. But the site owner should really think twice if they would like to use this kind of ads, as they might find themselves loosing more traffic over the bad user experience, than they gain over the extra added revenue coming through the Ads.